(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device for automatically arranging flat tiles used for paigow or other similar tile games.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
To play mah-jongg, it is necessary to shuffle mah-jongg tiles and to pile them up into the fixed arrangement. In recent years, automatic mah-jongg tables have been widely used to save players such labor.
In the automatic mah-jongg tables, each tile contains a magnet sealed therein in such a manner that the South pole faces the front of the tiles and that a strong North pole magnetic force is applied from under the shuffled tiles so as to turn all the tiles face down. The tiles thus turned face down are conveyed along a passage to be piled up into the fixed arrangement and lifted onto the table.
A game called paigow also requires that shuffled tiles are piled up in the fixed arrangement like mah-jongg. Paigow is played with 32 tiles and the dealer distributes four tiles to each player who tries to get a winning combination with four tiles. Before starting the game, the dealer is supposed to place tiles each having the shape shown in FIG. 1 arranged in eight rows of four levels each as shown in FIG. 2.
The players of this game also have desired a device for automatically arranging tiles. However, as shown in FIG. 1 the tiles used for paigow are thinner than normal mah-jongg tiles, requiring an extremely high moment to be turned over. For this reason, it is impossible to turn all the tiles face down by sealing a magnet into each tile and applying a strong magnetic force from below or above the tiles as in the automatic mah-jongg tables.